The Colin Powell Story

Through Woodward's new book and this month's article in GQ magazine, we hear a great deal more about the schism between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the rest of the Bush Administration.

While that's useful, I suppose, it would have been perhaps far more helpful if Powell had chosen not to tow the loyal soldier line through some incredibly bad decisions, including that disastrously incorrect presentation before the UN Security Council less than a month before we began to move on Iraq.

Nothing in what I've read so far makes me feel less disappointed in Powell, someone I considered a thoughtful man who was far more centrist than most of this administration. Yet I also accept that I have never walked in his shoes, and I'm willing to believe he thought he could accomplish more from within the administration than outside of it. However, for me, I feel Powell allowed himself to be used too often as a more-credible-than-most pawn in the Bush Administration's bullying of the rest of the world.